Report: Political map doesn't look good for Democrats in 2018

The political map doesn't look very good for Democrats ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, according to a new analysis published by FiveThirtyEight.

The analysis, written by Cook Political Report's David Wasserman, says that if Democrats were to win every single House and Senate race next year in places that Hillary Clinton won or that President Trump by less than 3 percentage points last November, they could still lose the House and lose five Senate seats.

Democrats, for example, hold six seats in the Senate out of the 26 Republican-leaning states and six are at risk next year, the report notes. Democrats will have to defend 25 of the 48 seats they currently occupy in the upper chamber while Republicans only have to defend eight of their 52 seats.

The political map, Wasserman wrote, is a product of Democratic clusters in urban areas and Republican gerrymandering.

Their odds don't look strong: the last time the Senate had such a strong Republican bias, it was 1913 when direct Senate elections were ratified, the report said. Democrats, however, did win back control of the House and Senate in 2006 when a GOP bias existed that year.

Hillary Clinton is hoping to get involved in the 2018 midterm election cycle, The Hill reported last month. The 2016 Democratic presidential nominee has been studying House districts she won in last year's election, two sources told The Hill. And she could appear on the campaign trail.

"She's very well aware of how she performed in those districts," said one longtime Clinton confidant said, who pointed out she won Republican Rep. Darrell Issa's district in California by 8 percentage points. "She knows she came close in about a handful of others. She has studied this stuff thoroughly."